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Once Shocking, Now Poetic

Considering how revolutionary Surrealist photography was in the years before World War II, what with its double-exposing, montaging, solarizing and other techniques, it may seem paradoxical that nostalgia would be the mood suffusing “Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography and Paris” at the International Center of Photography. But it makes sense.

For one thing, unlike so much art of that period, it looks truly old-fashioned. Technical innovations have since made possible images more absurd, bizarre and disjunctive than any the original Surrealists could have imagined. And in all the colors of the rainbow. Moreover, changes in popular taste have allowed the production of such outrageously transgressive images that Surrealist ones looks positively decorous — if not innocent — by comparison.

But even then, photographers like Andre Kertesz, Ilse Bing and Man Ray, finding themselves caught in the throes of sweeping change in the cultural capital of the Western world, were as preoccupied with what was being lost as with what might be gained by modernization.

Many photographs in this absorbing show — organized by Therese Lichtenstein, an independent curator, for the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, where it had its debut in September — set up poetic contrasts between the new and the old. In a 1934 picture by Bing, the Eiffel Tower soars against the night sky. With electric lights illuminating its corners and clocks on two sides, it is a beacon of futurity. In the left foreground rises the silhouette of an old brick chimney, the sign of a rapidly receding past.

In Kertesz’s nocturnal picture of gargoyles crouching on a tower of Notre Dame Cathedral with city lights glowing among buildings in the distance, from 1933, it seems as if beings from an ancient past are meditating ruefully on a present they know is destined for descent into atavistic violence.

Another canonical photograph by Kertesz offers a view through the glass-faced clock of the French Academy in 1932. With its giant Roman numerals layered over the expansive plaza traversed by anonymous pedestrians below, it is the clock of doom, harbinger of the Last Judgment.

Most straight photography registers an instant on the razor-fine edge between the past and the future, but in Surrealism that moment is more metaphorically loaded. The “twilight” of the exhibition’s title has as much to do with the mistier regions of consciousness as with the borderlands of real-world time and space.

The Surrealists’ enthusiasm for the photographs of Eugène Atget (1857-1927) — who was not himself a Surrealist — was another expression of their preoccupation with time. Between 1897 and his death, Atget devoted himself to documenting the old urban fabric of Paris. His shadowy pictures of cobbled lanes, curious architectural details and merchandise in shop windows — included in the exhibition as well as in a separate display of 31 prints — were discovered by Man Ray and Berenice Abbott in the 1920s. As Ms. Lichtenstein explains in her essay, the Surrealists initially viewed Atget’s work not as modern art but as a species of found photography, a kind of outsider art.

Photo

Andre Kertesz's 1932 photograph taken through the glass-faced clock of the French Academy is in the International Center of Photography show.Credit
Estate of Andre Kertesz/Higher Pictures, J. Paul Getty Museum

Be that as it may, many urban views in the exhibition appear influenced by Atget’s somber attentiveness to the city’s byways. A nighttime photograph of wet paving stones by Brassaï; a picture of tubas and other brass horns in the window of a musical instrument shop by Dora Maar; a de Chirico-like shot of a statue wrapped in a protective tarp taken by Josef Breitenbach: these images from the 1930s and many others in the show follow in Atget’s wandering footsteps.

Pictures of live human subjects are secondary to the cityscapes, but there are some striking examples. Maar’s 1930s picture of a half-length nude woman hanging from a trapeze ring by one hand and wearing a Greta Garbo mask is scarily haunting. By comparison, Hans Bellmer’s eccentrically pornographic pictures of life-size, anatomically scrambled dolls from 1935 and Kertesz’s images of nude women in distorting mirrors from 1933 seem trite.

Maar’s touching 1933 portrait of the beautiful painter Leonor Fini dressed in a chorus-girl outfit and holding a long-haired black cat in her lap is one of the few pictures that treats a woman like a human being instead of an erotic fantasy, a semi-abstraction or a freak of the demimonde.

Short Surrealist films are also shown on flat screens or as projections. Some of these are more hair-raising than most of the still photographs. One is “Un Chien Andalou,” the notorious 16-minute comic horror movie made in 1929 by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, in which a man appears to slice open a woman’s eyeball with a straight razor; ants crawl out of a hole in another man’s palm; and a woman pokes a severed hand in the street with her walking stick. Its hilarious weirdness — surely a major influence on David Lynch — holds up wonderfully today.

“The Vampire,” made by Jean Painlevé in 1939, is a horrifying, quasi-educational film about animals that live on the blood of other animals. It devotes most of its length to a South American bat attacking and guzzling the blood of a live guinea pig in a science lab. Sometimes nothing is more surreal than reality itself.

“Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography and Paris” runs through May 9 at the International Center of Photography, 1114 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street; (212) 857-0000; icp.org.

A version of this review appears in print on March 12, 2010, on Page C25 of the New York edition with the headline: Once Shocking, Now Poetic. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe